It used to be that storytelling and interactivity were enemies, pretty much like the web was a potential threat to print and TV. Decades after the first choose-your-own-adventure books, console games such as Metal Gear Solid proved that you could put a lot of emotion into interactive storytelling. Online experiences such as Requiem for a Dream showed us how you could experience a loose narrative using your mouse, and interactive films such as Being Henry proposed an intuitive way to add interactivity to live action narrative.

During the past few years, as TV loses advertising revenue to the web, there has been a surge of interactive live-action online content. Brands are embracing it wholeheartedly, but I can't help feeling we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Merging live action narrative with interactivity can be very entertaining indeed. You can compress all kinds of genres into a few minutes of intense experience, initiate unexpected twists and create the illusion that the content is endless. By putting the user in the driving seat, we have a vested interest in how the story turns out.

But is that all interactivity can do? By merely recounting of the possibilities of the media and devices around us, that answer is really obvious. For starters, you can measure, document, share and compare your experience with everyone else's. In addition, we are dealing with a totally different audience, one that has an increasingly shorter attention span and is constantly on the move. However brilliant our interactive story may be, if it is just about entertainment it might not be essential to a lot of people. With the first opportunity, our users drop out and are off to do something else – there is plenty of choice.

Wrapping it with a gaming concept certainly helps the user focus and sustain engagement; there is a clear goal, as sense or urgency and an element of competition – 'gamification' is not a buzzword for nothing.

When combined with a useful function, however, the experience becomes essential. Think of a story that enables you to buy the clothes the actors are wearing, a running app that constructs a narrative as you run or an interactive film where your choices reveal your personality. More often than not, it is a case of taking what users already do or want and enhancing it, revealing an unseen dimension or adding an entertainment layer on top.

A useful function provides the user with a clear focus. For example, if at the end of the story you know you are going to receive a proper personality profile, created with the help of a top business psychologist, you will be willing to complete the process as well as submit some data to the system about yourself. Moreover, the data collected will be interesting to the brand as well as to the general public. Are married people more direct than single people? Are the Germans more risky than the Greeks? By sharing this data on social networks, you are bound to get word of mouth that will drive usage upwards.

To ensure that an interactive story is as 'sticky' as possible, we need to address narrative, interactive and technical challenges at the same time, right from the start. If your scriptwriter is not speaking to the digital director, you have already missed a trick.

We also need to find out how much time our users have before they start the experience. If it is going to be used during lunch breaks, resist the urge to build up slowly and instead start with your most engaging moment, your hit single. If you are creating content for the iPad, you might have a bit more time to build up the narrative, as users will probably be at home. If they are with you for the first two minutes, they will stay for another eight.

Finally, ask your users to share at the height of engagement, when you have their full attention. If you leave it for the end, you might find they have already moved on to something else.

So can interactivity help tell a story in a better way? Often, yes. Does it have the potential to further engage the user? Definitely. Can it help us measure that engagement? In various ways and very precisely. Can any of this be actually useful or practical? I argue that it should be. Can it be viral? Yes, provided all the above. Can brands sell stuff at the back of it? I think we are bound to find out very soon.

Vassilios Alexiou is the founder and creative director of Less Rain, and a member of SoDA